The Scope

Geoffrey Smith is a world-renowned author, known for his many works covering art worldwide.

He already had a number of websites he'd created in WordPress, however none of these were doing quite what he wanted when it came to his main idea of a website that listed the Great Works of Western Art for all to search and discover.

For this he needed a standalone website, with multiple indexes and a full text search to allow people visiting to find exactly what they were looking for as quickly as possible.

With a background that included many "full text" search archive solutions across many thousands of pages and all indexed, Geoffrey entrusted us with creating his site.

What we Developed Hire Us Visit the site

We started off by creating a specification document ascertaining exactly what Geoffrey wanted the site to do and achieve. This is the fundamental foundation for any site. Without this specification, functionality can be forgotten and the customer could end up with something that doesn't meet their requirements.

We decided that the functionality Geoffrey was looking for didn't fall directly into any standard Django/Python CMS systems, so we'd have to write our own system for Geoffrey to update the website.

We wrote our own apps for each part of the website e.g. Artist, Painting, Museum/Gallery etc and made sure they were able to be cross-linked so a painting could be linked to an artist or an artist to a painting to allow for the easiest and smoothest input of data for Geoffrey.

image showing admin system screenshot from the great works of western art website

We then set about creating indexes that clearly listed the Paintings, Authors, Years and Museums and created mechanisms to allow users to quickly and easily navigate those indexes to find what they are looking for.

Finally a full text search with search indexes across all the of the apps was implemented so people could quickly search for an artist, painting, museum or even year and get immediate results.

So far the site has gained momentum across the search engines and currently the average monthly visitors has surpassed 5000 and its still growing.

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